Racial Cities

Giovanni Picker is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham School of Social Policy, UK.

• List of illustrationsForeword by Éric FassinAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Inside segregation1. NodesColony: segregation rationalesMetropole: from sedentarization to segregationConclusion: toward an ethnography of nodes2. DisplacementDisplacing the hygiene threatRacist order, racial iconsConclusion: evicted from diversity3. OmissionGoverning an "ethnic bomb""Racism is not a problem"Conclusion: racism and neoliberal doxa4. ContainmentColonial genesisContaining the outlandishConclusion: a spatio- racial political technology5. CohesionBackgroundSegregating cohesionConclusion: racially structured cohesion6. CorrespondencesAssembling nodesColonial past, neoliberal present: depoliticization and racelessnessConclusion: defining racial cities7. Conclusion: Beyond segregation?For the European city yet to comeUrban research and practiceArchivesReferencesIndex

Racial Cities, in its remarkable intersection of diverse strands of thought, demonstrates how the persistence of everyday colonialism roosts in Europe through the ordinary and proliferating segregations based on race continuously reinvented within the problematizing of Gypsy urban areas. In elaborating the racial complexion of European urban life, Picker emphasizes how the ordering of urban space remains reliant on the way specific territories are constituted to give body and visibility to open-ended threats, on the ways in which the rationales underlying segregations can be dismissed, remade, or rendered self-evident, where political deliberation is substituted by technical considerations, and where unyielding convictions about fundamental differences can silently operate through multiple vernaculars.AbdouMaliq Simone, Research Professor, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.Racial Cities sounds a vital alarm over everyday and institutionalized racism and discrimination vis-à-vis Romani people, defined at once as a scourge and threat, in a race-blind Europe. Not only does Giovanni Picker draw needed light to the "organizing logic" and specificity of race, biologized as culture, in neoliberal states from the East to the West, he also illuminates how Romani segregation is a conspicuous lived-reality—hidden in plain sight—that indexes a naturalized and under-analyzed anti-Romism, and thereby a distinct yet familiar race question in Europe. Capturing the nexus between practices of expulsion and disposable confinement, Picker reinforces the fact that space is indeed raced. Trica Keaton, Associate Professor, Dartmouth College and author of .Muslim Girls and the Other France